Good question but sustainable is a concept. So, it may be perceived differently in various regions. I suggest, it would be better to prepare such a questionnaire in the local context and share for feedback/comments.

The NEP is the most widely applied scale of environmental attitudes in the world. Its wide use is self-sustaining, because now there are so many studies that have examined its variability across different countries, socio-economic status, etc. that it can be adjusted and applied in most every setting. I have used the NEP in a study of farmers and farming practices, and while I do think the scale provides a simple measure of environmental attitudes, I would emphasize that it is a truly simple measure, and that from my experience, in which we conducted much more in depth interviews with all participants, it seems that the use of these simple scales glosses over much of the variability that actually exists in the environmental attitudes. Because people score themselves, their only benchmark to score themselves against is....themselves. Therefore the scoring system is fundamentally skewed for each individual, and when you look more in depth and with more data and judge each individual from a single (however subjective) perspective you find that the actual beliefs about the environment are much more complex and variable.

All that said...the NEP scale is a decent proxy for a general understanding of the variability of environmental attitudes within a study population.

Regarding Shepherdʻs Sustainable Development Scale I have read the book but havenʻt applied the scale, but in general I would agree with Asmat, and echo that sustainability is a concept, and that concept is subjective. Therefore each population will have a different concept of what sustainability is, and therefore needs to be measured differently. I work extensively with indigenous communities, and how we envision sustainability and what the end goals of sustainability are differ very substantially from what Shepherd defines the measurements as. Your students in the study likewise may have different opinions of what sustainability is, and to apply a standard scale to measure their adherence is, in my opinion, putting the cart before the horse.

Tanks for replying. I've used NEP-Scale already with students. And we had twice the problem that we had huge ceiling effects. Our suggestion is that they answerd socially desirable. With Sepherds Scale we had the probelm as well and we couldn't replicate the factorial structure although we have large sample sizes (n=600-700)  What are your experiences with this scales?

I've used the NEP in my doctoral work; however, the goal was not understanding people´s environmental attitudes per se, but controlling them to assess other effects.  I agree that both concepts are context dependant, thus comparing across different populations needs to be done carefully. Attitudinal measures are key to understand the way individuals see the world, as opposed to the way the world is.  Also, there is soon to be launched by the UN the new Sustainable Development Goals to follow the Millennium Development Goals. I wonder if a global comprehensive set of goals would be optimal to compare sustainable development across countries.

Anna, I have used NEP scale for evaluating the differences in primary school children's environmental attitude in two different types of schools: Sustainable schools and conventional schools. I agree with others in that although NEP is the most widely used scale, but it is a simple measure. I suggest you to add some items to this scale to make it context-related. Just be mindful about the internal consistency of your modified scale. Check the Cronbach’s alpha with a smaller sample before you conduct your study to the whole sample. This was what I did for my PhD thesis. I also suggest you to search about these scales:

CATES, 2-MEV, CEP, CHEAKS.

They might not be as popular as NEP, but might fit the purpose o your study.

I just came across this other article and thought it may be of interest.

Environment, Development and Sustainability

June 2013, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp 607-623

Evaluating education for sustainable development (ESD): using Ecocentric and Anthropocentric Attitudes toward the Sustainable Development (EAATSD) scale

By: Helen Kopnina

Thank you all for your helpful answers

Hello Anna, we have done a study in Mexico whit middle-school students, our first language is spanish, so we adapted a questionnaire developed by the Grup de Recerca Educacio i Ciutadani from the Universitat de Illes Balears. The instrument have three sub-scales: knowledge, perception and attitudes about the ambiental problems. 

I agree with Noa Lincoln, subjectivity of autoinforms is always an issue in the research, due to the influence of social desirability.

I have attached our work. I hope it be helpful.

Thank you Fabiola for sharing your study. I´m glad to find tools in Spanish. Although you mentioned the instrument used by Oliver, Castells, Casero y Morey (2005), would you mind sharing the questionnaire you used in your study? Thank you again!

Of course Anna y Sergio Molina, I share you the questionnaire. 

Some explications for a better understanding of our research:

We used NEP-Scale without modifications and had ceiling effects. We then used ESD-Scale and had the same problems. Then we compared our results with results from different universities (same age, same semester, same measure point) and we found also ceiling effects. Afterwards we extended the scale from 5-point to 7-point likert scale, but the results stayed the same.

I personally think that the NEP has some major shortcomings and that in a certain way is a bit outdated. I have myself developed a scale measuring different 'worldviews', which appeared to be significantly correlated with both environmental attitudes and sustainable lifestyles. See the attached publication. In my newest research I build forth on this effort to measure worldviews, with even better results. I haven't published on this last study yet, but if you are interested in seeing or using this scale, just email me at [email protected]. Good luck with your work! 

I suggest having a look at Price, Walker, Boschetti 2014 Measuring cultural values and beliefs about environment to identify their role in climate change responses, Jnl of Environmental Psychology 37 8-20.  

An earlier working paper covers similar issues:  http://www.per.marine.csiro.au/staff/Fabio.Boschetti/papers/Measuring%20cultural%20values%20and%20beliefs.pdf 

If any of you are interested in future cross-country collaborations to assess this or similar aspects with a sample from Costa Rica (an apparently green country), let me know, I´ll be glad to get involved. You may contact me here or directly at [email protected] or [email protected].

In relation to sustainable development knowledge and understanding several articles exist that have based their methodology on a questionnaire. I would suggest looking at Azapagic et al (2005), European Journal of Engineering Education 30(1), 1-19 and Nicolaou and Conlon (2012), European Journal of Engineering Education 37(3), 267-277 (available to download in my page)

Moreover a more qualitative study based on the SOLO taxonomy on students' attitudes on SD has been published by Carew and Mitchel (2002), European Journal of Engineering Education  27(4), 349-361.

Last week we discussed issues related to the NEP-Scale at http://esdsummerschool.wordpress.com/ (ESD = Education for Sustainable Development) directly with Kerry Shepard (http://hedc.otago.ac.nz/hedc/about-us/our-people/?uid=sheke98p). He has done a lot of work on students affective attributes and used the NEP in longitudinal studies.

For example:

Harraway, J., Broughton-Ansin, F., Deaker, L., Jowett, T., & Shephard, K. (2012). Exploring the use of the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale (NEP) to monitor the development of students' ecological worldviews. Journal of Environmental Education, 43(3), 177-191. doi: 10.1080/00958964.2011.634450

Shephard, K., Harraway, J., Lovelock, B., Skeaff, S., Slooten, L., Strack, M., & Jowett, T. (2012). Monitoring changes in the sustainability attributes of higher education students in a New Zealand university. In W. L. Filho (Ed.), Sustainable development at universities: New horizons (pp. 117-126). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.

Our discussion resulted in a lot of criticisms in relation to the dichotomous concepts of biocentrism and anthroposentrism.

What Do you think about that paradigm?

Hi Anna,

That is precisely one of my central criticisms of the NEP (and several other environmental scales). I personally think we should also create options for participants to move beyond the dichotomy, towards a more synthetic or integrative view in the world. I extensively discuss these criticisms in the attached article, and offer as an alternative a framework that operationalizes worldviews in more comprehensive ways, and distinguishes between at least three or four different worldviews, such as more traditional, modern, postmodern, and integrative ones.

Love to hear your thoughts on this!

Best wishes,

Annick

Note: I am the same guy who put his response above to this question. I had mistakenly somehow developed a duplicate account, which I deleted now (above). Thus, have copied and pasted the earlier response (below) into my only one active account as follows:

Hello! I worked on a sustainable development research project in which national sustainability headline indicators (UK and Wales) were transposed in to an exhaustive questionnaire to quantify sustainability and environmental performance of each organisation as overall, and also as individual sustainability components (e.g. waste, water, energy, etc.). A conference paper is attached which gives a brief view of the questionnaire and a final report is also attached which captures output(s) of the research work. This was also presented to the national assembly of Wales to inform their future sustainability strategy for various sectors and industries. Both documents are attached, if you find them useful, I may be able to send you an e-copy of the questionnaire copy too.

Let me know.

Best of luck.

Talib E. Butt

Hi, Anna, I am dealing with a similar issue in health impact assessment project. I have found something about "Glazsiou pipeline model" mainly used on medical research that indicates a scale from "awareness-acceptance-applicability-abling-action on-agreement-adherence to", but I think it is more a procedures' set than a model itsfelf.

There goes a reference:  http://ebm.bmj.com/content/10/1/4.2.full.pdf+html

Thank you all very much. While researching for new methods to assess values and attitudes I came across this website: http://www.conpsychmeasures.com/ which helped me a lot to find some interesting questionaires.

HI Anna,

Thanks for stimulating such an interesting discussion.  My colleagues and I have used the NEP scale in both cross-sectional and longitudinal research with tertiary students from many cultures and enrolled in institutions around the world.  The NEP is very useful for highlighting the structure of peoples environmental concern, which can be seen by looking at each of the five dimension separately instead of NEP as a single measure. Coupled with open ended questions, you can get some very useful insights into peoples current thinking and worldviews.

In our research, we found a strong incidence of an integrative approach by students from particular cultures, which has also been discussed by other researchers such as:

"Corral-Derdugo, Carrus, Bonnes, Moser, & Sinha (2008) who demonstrate that in some cultures, the ecocentric view is compatible with anthropocentric beliefs, as borne out by studies of Brazilian, Japanese and Mexican participants. They suggest conciliation between the eco-anthropocentric dichotomy and offer an alternative New Human Interdependence Paradigm (NHIP), which integrates the two approaches. This integrated worldview is supported by their own research and by other studies, particularly in developing or transitional economies (Bechtel, Corral-Verdugo, Asai, & Riesie, 2006). In studies of Turkish university students, Dervisoglu (2010) reportsmost students hold an ‘anthropocentric environmentalist’ or ‘utilitarian’ point of view, where nature is valued for the direct benefits it can provide to humans, while Erdogan (2009) finds the majority of students hold a mild pro-environmental view with the remainder holding either ambivalent or pro-anthropocentric views..  " (Sidiropoulos, Wex and Sibley, 2013, p.56)

Attached are copies of my publications using NEP..

Cheers

Liz

Attached is my latest paper on NEP and reports the findings of a large multi-university study on the influence of a range of personal, situational and educational factors on tertiary students views, attitudes and behaviour. The final version can be sourced at Article The personal context of student learning for sustainability:...

A validity and reliability study of the Attitudes

toward Sustainable Development scale

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